Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Newworlds

While I agree with some of what is said here, I disagree with the premise and idea there is not a community and that there is a cutthroat struggle for supremacy. I've seen over the last couple of years that many Admins are cordial and sometimes even positive in promoting other games. I've seen the community stop bickering like children and begin to promote eachother's accomplishments.

I can't speak for Wikipedia because I've never promoted anything or created anything there.

I've seen good things, too, along with the bad, but I think the bottom line is that this kind of gaming is extremely niche. If we had many thousands of active fans, we would have no trouble staying on the radar.

The historical importance of MUDs seems to be fairly well-recognized in a number of Wiki articles on actually prominent games. We are not prominent. It's even hard to tell if MUDs ever were prominent. All that we know for sure is that MUDs were influential and ahead of their time in certain types of online game design.

My return to MUD administration in 2009 was driven by the desire to re-invent mudding for a new generation of players. Unfortunately, I don't see much of a community when it comes to that goal. The general consensus seems to be that if something has graphics, or doesn't have room descriptions, then it's no longer a MUD. At the same time, most actively developed MUDs seem to be engaged in the 0-sum game of developing increasingly esoteric features to draw from an ever-shrinking pool of jaded veterans rather than try to reach people who have never played a MUD before.

With such priorities, we should be okay with becoming footnotes to other games.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Well, if there is a community they don't seem to be interested in promoting their games to non-mudders. I don't even remember how I even stumbled upon the existence of Muds, I think it was an accident. And I haven't seen a single advertisement for a mud anywhere outside of mud forums, not even a thread promoting a mud game.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

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Originally Posted by prof1515

Case in point, tonight a friend sent me a message that Accursed Lands was again using false information regarding their game on their Wikipedia page. From claiming to be an early RPI to denying that their so-called RPIMUD Game of the Year title was rescinded, it's an example of why this genre isn't taken seriously.

You are right. That's an example of why the genre isn't taken seriously. It isn't taken seriously because people have idiotic holy wars insisting they own the "One True Definition" of terms like RPI, and they go around "rescinding titles" from games because something happens with their feature set or management.

That kind of crap doesn't happen in the rest of the industry. If someone says their game is an action, tactical shooter with RPG elements, you don't see veterans of other companies trashing them for not being a "real RPG." Mature members of the gaming industry let other people define their games how they want. Then they let the players decide if the definition is BS or not. They don't engage in open hostility for the whole world to see. That's the kind of crap that makes the MUD community look juvenile and silly.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

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Originally Posted by Verbannon

How many people are actually trying to defend Mudding or even care how well recognized MUDDing is as its own platform and how many only care about strengthening their own Mud's playerbase?

It is funny you would say that in THIS thread of all places. This thread started when someone bucking for admin rank tried to delete Threshold's Wikipiedia entry. The amount of support we received was ENORMOUS. Fellow MUD admins, respected industry veterans (Raph Koster, Dr. Richard Bartle, Brian Green), and tons of mud players who never played Threshold came to our defense.

The AFD page (Article For Deletion - the official way a page deletion is debated) for Threshold was, at the time, the largest AFD in the history of Wikipedia. The AFD was something like 95% in favor of keeping the Threshold page. The amount of support we received was massive.

There have been other examples of the same type of rallying together in this thread and other threads on the forum. Yes, there is far too much backbiting and pettiness in our community. It is a real shame. There are ancient grudges that people really should let go of that continue to cripple us. Mobile gaming is actually a great opportunity for MUDs to gain exposure, because the low bandwidth and small client footprints work really well on mobile devices.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Newworlds

While I agree with some of what is said here, I disagree with the premise and idea there is not a community and that there is a cutthroat struggle for supremacy. I've seen over the last couple of years that many Admins are cordial and sometimes even positive in promoting other games. I've seen the community stop bickering like children and begin to promote eachother's accomplishments..

I agree. We still have major problems in our community, but it is light years better now than it was even 4 or 5 years ago.

People do what they can to help the community depending on their skills and opportunities. Very few of us do as much as Lasher and Icculus running TMS and TMC, but its great that people do what they can.

Speaking for myself, a few years back I was doing some freelance writing as a hobby. I ended up becoming the Managing Editor of Gaming on a large web site (40 million monthly page views). I made an offer to the community to write about anyone's MUD: Need Reliable Source/Media Attention for your MUD?. If I recall, only 1 or 2 muds took me up on it, but I believe they were happy for the media coverage.

We have a very old community that is unfortunately weighed down by some negative history. But we are fighting through it and slowly but steadily improving. That's something positive to build on I think.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

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Originally Posted by Threshold

You are right. That's an example of why the genre isn't taken seriously. It isn't taken seriously because people have idiotic holy wars insisting they own the "One True Definition" of terms like RPI, and they go around "rescinding titles" from games because something happens with their feature set or management.

That kind of crap doesn't happen in the rest of the industry. If someone says their game is an action, tactical shooter with RPG elements, you don't see veterans of other companies trashing them for not being a "real RPG." Mature members of the gaming industry let other people define their games how they want. Then they let the players decide if the definition is BS or not. They don't engage in open hostility for the whole world to see. That's the kind of crap that makes the MUD community look juvenile and silly.

While I'm sure the bickering doesn't help, I don't think it has much to do with the slow death of MUDs. I think the bottom line is most of us refuse to go where the players are, and if they do go, they refuse to give the players what they want in a 21st Cent. online game.

For example, there are now thousands of browser-based MMO's on Facebook that look super-sleek but whose gameplay is so shallow that any stock MUD can blow them out of the water. There is not a single MUD I can think of on Facebook (mine included) that has achieved the same sleek look and incorporated all the elements that the crowds have come to expect from a social game.

A big part of the reason for this is that there never really was any real money in MUDs. (If there had been, we would probably have an industry as well as a community.) An even bigger part is, I think, the fact that MUDs stubbornly refuse to look like other games, they require a lot of reading (hard to localize) and typing, as well as paying close attention. Most of them don't even have a "pause" button.

And if you're one of those devs who is willing to bend "the rules" to turn the clock past 1996, then you're most likely not reading this post because you've already been disowned by this community.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Newworlds

I can't speak for Wikipedia because I've never promoted anything or created anything there.

There's something of a "rising tide lifts all boats" attitude. Having a presence on Wikipedia helps all muds, and the whole "conflict of interest" thing pretty much necessitates cooperation, as we're not supposed to add content to articles about our own muds.

As far as the community is concerned, of course there is competition and rivalry, but most muds were only made possible by the contributions of others - and many of us give back to the community, whether in the form of code, areas, tools, articles, or whatever else.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

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Originally Posted by Threshold

You are right. That's an example of why the genre isn't taken seriously. It isn't taken seriously because people have idiotic holy wars insisting they own the "One True Definition" of terms like RPI, and they go around "rescinding titles" from games because something happens with their feature set or management.

You really shouldn't make ignorant comments when you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The title was rescinded after it was discovered that massive cheating in the voting had been going on. Hundreds of bogus accounts had been created since the site's start. They were easily identified because the culprits weren't that bright and often used the same email address when registering them or used bogus emails that were easy to spot (bigdog0(at), bigdog00(at), bigdog000(at), etc. all created on the same day, one after another). When those bogus accounts were deleted several games took hits in their vote totals, none so large as Accursed Lands which dropped by 75% in their vote totals the following week.

After a few weeks, some of these games had partially recovered their vote totals (though nowhere near as high as before the bogus account purge) and a second sweep through the accounts discovered dozens of new bogus accounts had been recently created. These accounts were purged and once more the following week vote totals dipped. Hardest hit again was Accursed Lands which once more dropped pretty much all the ground they'd regained since the first cleanup. While AL had "won" the voting for years, the difference between their totals before the purge and their totals after the cleanup was so huge that they couldn't even make it into the top five (they dropped to sixth or seventh). Since these bogus accounts mostly dated back to the site's start, it put great doubt as to whether or not AL had indeed won fairly or that any of the games' totals were reflective of honest voting.

At the same time, a bug was discovered that could allow a single account to vote an infinite number of times. This potential bug was tested and confirmed and as a result of this bug and the clear impact of the bogus accounts, the committee unanimously decided that voting should be discontinued and that and previous results were unverifiable. Hence the title was rescinded though we stopped short of directly accusing AL, any of its staff or its players of cheating. Months later, the identity of one of the cheaters was ascertained and it turned out to be one of AL's staff though by that point voting had long been discontinued and the titles rescinded.

Re: In defense of all MUDs. Our genre's noteworthiness is being questioned.

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Originally Posted by prof1515

You really shouldn't make ignorant comments when you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Nothing I said was ignorant. When you gave more detail, you just proved my point. It was yet another pointless, petty drama.

I don't have to know all the nitty gritty details about some petty drama to know its silly and ultimately irrelevant to the community at large. In fact, I'd prefer not to know all the painful details.

Quote:

Originally Posted by prof1515

The title was rescinded after it

(snip three paragraph description of a spectacularly trivial and petty story about cheating in some silly internet vote)

Lets not forget you actually asserted that Accursed Lands claiming to be an early RPI was one of the reasons our "genre isn't taken seriously."

Quote:

Originally Posted by prof1515

Case in point, tonight a friend sent me a message that Accursed Lands was again using false information regarding their game on their Wikipedia page. From claiming to be an early RPI to denying that their so-called RPIMUD Game of the Year title was rescinded, it's an example of why this genre isn't taken seriously.

WHO CARES?!?!?!

Don't you get it? Normal people don't give a damn about stupid, pointless distinctions like that. Heck, most people *IN* the MUD community don't care. People outside of it care even less.

In the rest of the gaming industry, third parties don't feel compelled to butt in on developers describing and categorizing their games how they want.

If a developer is deceptive in describing their game, that's a problem between the developer and the customer. Other companies stay out of it. It would be unseemly and unprofessional to behave otherwise.